Reduction of manufacturing costs and increased miniaturization continue to be important goals in the design of electrical components of a wide variety of types. Often these goals go hand-in-hand as increasing miniaturization helps to achieve reductions in the costs of assembling or implementing electrical circuitry.
The use of integrated circuits in electrical components often helps to achieve both of these goals. Yet the benefits achieved through the use of integrated circuits in terms of cost and size reduction often are restricted insofar as typically the integrated circuits must interface with other discrete electrical components in order to perform any desired function.
More particularly, in many applications electrical circuit devices are used that cannot be easily implemented on integrated circuits, for example, inductors, large capacitors or large resistors. When implemented as discrete devices, these devices tend to be relatively large such that they significantly increase the size of the overall electrical component (e.g., as constructed on a circuit board).
Further, in at least some cases the integrated circuits themselves need to be modified and even enlarged to include additional leads/pins to allow for coupling of the integrated circuits with the discrete devices. The addition of more leads/pins can increase not only the size but also the cost of the integrated circuit. Also, additional leads increase the susceptibility of the overall electrical component to noise.
The above considerations relating to the design of electrical components are particularly relevant in the case of designing sensors, for example, photosensors. Not only is it desirable to reduce the costs of sensors, but also, given that sensors are often implemented in confined spaces, and in sensitive environments, it is often particularly desirable to reduce the size of sensors as well as to reduce their susceptibility to noise.
Yet conventional sensors, and in particular conventional photosensors, typically include one or more large discrete devices such as large capacitors and large resistors that cannot be implemented on an integrated circuit. Further, to accommodate the use of these discrete devices in conjunction with integrated circuits that are often used in such sensors, the integrated circuits typically require large numbers of leads/pins.
For at least these reasons, therefore, it would be advantageous if an improved sensor design could be developed in which fewer discrete devices were used and/or the number of leads/pins of an integrated circuit included within the sensor could be reduced in comparison with conventional sensor designs. Indeed, in at least some embodiments, it would be advantageous if such an improved sensor design could be implemented without the use of any discrete devices except possibly a sensing device such as, in the case of a photosensor, a photodiode.